Friday 14 October 2011 17.55 EDT
First published on Friday 14 October 2011 17.55 EDT

Just Boris, a life of the London mayor, written by Sonia Purnell, Johnson's No 2 in Brussels when he was Europe correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, had an uneasy reception. Camilla Long in the Sunday Times pointed out that "Purnell has not, in spite of appearances, spoken to anyone in the Johnson family, or any of his three reported lovers, Petronella Wyatt, Anna Fazackerley or Helen Macintyre. The resulting portrait is extraordinarily damning. God knows what Bozza did to her in the Belgian photocopying room, but Purnell's Boris is a blethering, inept, avaricious, emotionally stunted, "goosey-fleshed" "Aryan pig", with sloppy loins and the body odour of an Elizabethan street prostitute … I can well believe Boris is a sexual menace, but couldn't Purnell have got someone on the record?" "This is a thorough biography and Johnson is a compelling subject," wrote the FT's Jonathan Ford. "But the code is never really cracked and occasionally Purnell resorts to unsatisfying, cuttings-fuelled speculation. The book crackles into life only when its subject, a natural comic, is quoted." Andrew Gimson in the Spectator felt much the same: "Purnell adopts a somewhat humourless tone towards her subject … She has paid Boris the unintended compliment of making immense efforts to trip him up, and not quite managing to do so."

Alice Albinia wrote in the FT that Mohammed Hanif's "first novel, the prizewinning A Case of Exploding Mangoes, dissected the culture of General Zia's military dictatorship with panache and precision." His new book, Our Lady of Alice Bhatti, the heroine of which "is a 'low-caste' Catholic nurse in a run-down Karachi hospital … feels chaotic by comparison … Alice's transformation from a mute woman who doesn't want to be noticed to the valiant nurse she becomes at work is reminiscent of a comic book metamorphosis". The unsigned review in the Scotsman was effusive: "Alice Bhatti's Karachi is so alive with sensations that you can smell the sewers, hear the screeching of tyres, and feel the humidity. Your toes squirm at the layers of dirt in the fly-blown ward." Phil Baker in the Sunday Times held that "comedy and serious violence are a tricky combination for a writer … Too knockabout and buffoonish to be a serious study of violence to women in Pakistani culture, too ugly to be funny, this heavy-handed book might be well intended but it is a bloody mess."

John Carey's review in the Sunday Times of Claire Tomalin's Charles Dickens: A Life set up the problem of how to squeeze the novelist's busy, energetic life into a single book. "Her solution is rigorous control. She cuts her narrative to the bone, while selecting points of emphasis that build up the portrait she wants. The result is vivid, illuminating and, as lives of Dickens go, refreshingly short." According to John Sutherland in the Literary Review, there have been around 90 full-length lives of Dickens, but this addition to the long list is worthwhile: "At every point of Dickens's life Tomalin can give the all-too-familiar facts a twist that brings into view a hitherto unregarded facet. An avowed admirer of his greatness, she is refreshingly unforgiving about his 'dark side', giving full vent to distaste for his chronic meanness to family members." For Tom Sperlinger in the Independent on Sunday, the book "succeeds brilliantly, like so much of Tomalin's work, in its set-piece scenes", and also in its tone, which is "measured and sometimes cool". However, it is an "essentially conservative biography" with "few fresh insights".